


Desert Dreams and Dark Delights

by Annfan



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post twister AU, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 10:33:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17282423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annfan/pseuds/Annfan
Summary: In another world Richie doesn’t go with  Santanico and los hermanos geckos ride again, with the company of one Kate Fuller: preachers daughter.





	Desert Dreams and Dark Delights

 

Richie was the devil come to tempt her and Kate wonders sometimes if she unknowingly sold her soul by taking that cigarette.

 

 

After the bloodbath at the Twister Kate stands outside alone and numb. She’s lost everything. Her heart aches. But it a way she also feels reborn. She’s a Phoenix forged in the fires of hell.

 “Honestly, I have no idea where I’m going. But I think, after tonight, I’m gonna be fine.” She tells the Ranger and she’s never been more sure of anything in her life.

They come outside, Seth has one arm thrown over Richie’s shoulder and is grinning ear to ear. Richie has a jacket thrown over his head and is hissing at the sun. He quickly clambers in the backseat of the sports car and hides from the sun. 

 They don’t ask her to come with them but they don’t command it either. She simply does.

 She drops the keys to the RV in the dust of the Mexican desert and climbs in the front seat. Seth gives her a short nod. A nod of respect from one survivor to another. Then he accelerates and they go off into the sunrise.

 

 

Kate slips a little pink retainer in before bed. 

“I used to have to wear one of those,” Richie remarks, as if she might care. “I don’t anymore though.” He smiles smugly.

“Well good for you.”

There are two beds. Richie doesn’t sleep in either of them. He leaves the motel room as soon as the sun sets.

Seth doesn’t say anything, just crawlsinto bed behind Kate, wraps his arms around her like he is comforting her. She knows the touch is more to ease his mind than hers, but she curls into him anyway and closes her eyes. 

Her dreams are full of blood and snakes and the sound of her own screams.

 

 

Richie feeds on a girl with smudged black eyeliner and ripped tights. Her blonde hair smells of metal from the many times it’s been scorched into straightness by a flat iron. He pushes the hair to the side, presses his fangs in deeper in the crook of her neck. 

She whimpers, but doesn’t fight much, just a weak jerking of her upper body before she falls limp against the wall. He sees a muddy stream of images, they flow into him along with her blood. He sees such a long history of abuse that it all blurs together, a screaming older man and hard fists against a soft child’s body, a drunk boyfriend and broken glass. This girl has had the fight taken out of her along time ago.

 Seth has always tried to avoid killing civilians but when it comes down to it he doesn’t mind spilling innocent blood if it gets him what he wants. The difference between Seth and Richie is that for Sethit’s a means to an end. For Richie it is the end. Even as a human he always had the urge to take people apart and see what was inside, had always enjoyed pulling the trigger just a little too much. It’s not that he wanted to hurt innocent people, he wasn’t a complete monster, but he couldn’t deny that when he had to kill he relished in it. There was always something inside him that was different, something that wasn’t right, and he wonders if that’s why being what he is now comes so easily to him. 

 

 

Kate watches quietly from the backseat as they drive through miles of nothingness. She listens to them reminisce in the nostalgia of glory days that she wasn’t present for. 

“You should have seen it Katie-cakes,” Seth is laughing, going on about a brilliant heist they pulled in Montana.

 Richie sees her flinch at the nickname and he smiles a slow, lazy smile at her in the rear view mirror. She trembles, just a little, he isn’t sure if it’s from anger or fear. He wonders if she ever dreams about tearing them apart, heroically slaying them in their sleep. They are monsters after all and she has plenty to avenge.

 

 

When she was little Kate’s favorite princess was Belle, she loved the way her yellow dress spun in the dancing scene, loved the way she was able to turn the beast back into a man with her love. Kate used to dream that one day she would love someone enough to save them. 

 Now Kate knows that her love isn’t enough to save anyone. It wasn’t enough to save her mama, or her daddy, or her brother. Now Kate is almost eighteen and she is wearing a short yellow sundress and watching a man transform into a beast in front of her. She turns away as he rips out the jugular of a balding, middle age man. She pretends to clean her nails, trying to fake a kind of nonchalance that is impossible for her. No matter how much she tries to pretend otherwise, she isn’t like the Gecko brothers and she never will be. She feels too much.

 Richie stands and wipes his mouth on the dark sleeve of his suit jacket, smooths his hair back into its perfect gelled style. “Thanks,” He says.

 She shrugs, “that’s what you get when you troll for underaged girls.”

 She fidgets with the hem of the skirt which the desert wind is threatening to blow over her head. He pretends not to notice her discomfort.

 

 

After several months in Mexico Seth returns to the motel with fake papers and new tattoos. 

 As Seth sleeps Richie traces his fingers over the black ink that covers the puncture marks on his brother’s neck.Seth shifts, stretches toward him unconsciously. Richie waits for him to settle back down and the reaches over him to the young girl on the other side of the bed and tenderly brushes a strand of hair away from her face.

 

 

They are in a temporary motel in West Texas and Seth is out on a liquor run when Kate makes her way over to the coach where Richie is watching TV, a nature documentary about glacial melting. He switches the television off when she slides up next to him, bare legs tucked up under the teal beach dress he bought her in Acapulco. 

 “Richie.” Kate whispers, looking up at him shyly.

She looks every bit as innocent as the pure preachers daughter who once kissed him sweetly in the back room of a strip bar. He knows she isn’t innocent though. He has seen her slice culebras in half with a chainsaw. That knowledge, of what she is capable of, turns him on even more.

He reaches out, pulls her into his lap. 

“Richie.” She sighs again.

 He presses his lips against hers. It isn’t sweet this time.

 He slides his fingers into her, practiced and smooth, with the same precision he would use to throw a knife or load a magazine into a handgun. She might as well be a knife or a gun, just another object for him to manipulate.

 She moans into his neck and he feels the sharp edge of her teeth against his neck. He wonders what it would feel like if she bit down.

 

 

Richie watches Seth and Kate from the doorway of a hotel balcony in Vegas. They’re eating chocolate bars Seth got from the vending machine downstairs. 

 Seth makes a gross, crude joke and Kate rolls her eyes.

 “You’re an awful person sometimes,” she says and he grins like it’s a compliment. For Seth it might as well be. He wears his violent and criminal past like a badge of honor.

“I’m an awful person most of the time sweetheart.” 

She snags his candy bar and doges his attempt to grab her, sticking her tongue out.

 

 

Kate has been with them for five months when she reads about Monica Garza on the computer in a Las Cruses public library. The article is old, forgotten in the archives of a little known Texas newspaper. People have moved on to bigger things, terrorists and scandals and the state of the economy. 

“Did you really kill that bank teller like they said you did?” She asks him while they are sitting under the bright neon light of the Sahara Motel. The green of the fake palm tree on the sign flickers on and off, the slow hum of electricity fills the air.

It’s night time and the pool is technically closed but rules don’t apply to Kate Fuller anymore. They’ve never applied to Richie Gecko.

“Yes,” Richie responds. He takes a slow drag of the cigarette dangling in between his lips. “Santanico told me to.” 

Kate furrows her brow a little, looks at him almost understandingly, almost pityingly. She always tries so hard to find the good in people, he muses. He hates pity though, even if it is from an angel-eyed, pure-souled preacher’s daughter.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I’m sorry she made you do that, that’s awful.”

“She didn’t make me do anything. She just told me to and I did it.”

Kate shifts uncomfortably in the white, plastic pool chair. “Do you feel bad about it?”

Richie feels bile rise in his throat. He shoves away memories of screams and blood and pink bunny phones. He lies. “No, I don’t.”

“You’re an awful person,” she says.

“No shit.” He flicks the butt of his cigarette on to the ground and stomps it out with the heel of his shiny black shoe. He stares at her as he does, as if to challenge her into condemning the fact that he has just added littering to his list of many sins.

She doesn’t. All she does is turn and pad softly away with bare feet against the dark, cool concrete.

 

 

Richie starts to get bored. He’s tired of living on the road, feeding on random vagrants at night and pulling small jobs during the day.  

“Let’s go back to Austin,” he tells Seth.

“Okay buddy,” Seth agrees. “Next week, next week we’ll go to Uncle Eddie’s.

Kate listens silently from the other side of the room, lips wrapped around a strawberry lollipop.

 

 

“I’ve got to go find my brother.” Kate announces one day, with no explanation. 

 Seth forbids it. _Don’t be a fucking idiot_. _Your brother is dead_. (Of course he doesn’t acknowledge that his is too, technically). _It’s too dangerous_.

 Richie hears her open the hotel door and slip out into the night but he doesn’t say anything. He knows what it means to be willing to do anything to save your brother. 

 She takes her fake papers, a single backpack, and the car with her.

 In the morning Seth kicks things and rages and cusses about the car. It’s easier to pretend that the car is what he is most worried about. Again, Richie doesn’t say anything.

 

 

They pull a big heist once they get back to Austin. Seth says he is celebrating and then drinks until he blacks out.

 

 

It’s three months before Kate returns. She finds them in Austin. Richie comes back in the early morning to see her siting at the kitchen table, laughing with Eddie over a cup of coffee.

 She stands when she sees him, her eyes look more alive than he can ever remember seeing them. She walks over to him, wraps her arms around him in a hug.

 “Hey Richie. I missed you.”

 “Missed you too.” He says. “Did you find him?”

 “Yeah, I did.” He can feel her smile against his chest.

 Seth stumbles into the room just as they pull away from each other. He rubs sleep from his eyes, flannel pajamas slung low on his hips. When he finally sees Kate a myriad of emotions crosses his face. Relief, surprise, anger. Finally, he clenches his jaw, silently turns and stalks out of the room.

 Kate looks up at Richie questioningly.

 Richie rolls his eyes. “Just give him some time, he’ll come around.”

 Eddie nods from the table and sips on his coffee. “Don’t worry bout it doll. My nephew has just got a damn thick head sometimes.”

 

 

Richie is right. Seth does come around. A week later he hears a sound and peers through the door of Seth’s bedroom. Kate’s form is almost hidden under his brother’s large one. She has one slender leg wrapped around his and he is kissing the girl like she is his only source of oxygen.

 Richie smiles and leaves them before they notice his presence. 

 

 

They’re all sitting on the couch after a evening of teaching Kate how to hustle people at pool. Seth and Richie are riveted to the old western on the screen, even thought Kate is certain they’ve both seen it a million times. She can tell by the way Richie mouths the words silently at certain parts and Seth leans forward right when he knows the action is about to get good.

 Her phone screen lights up and she glances down at the the message.

_Hey sis, think you’ll be able to make it to my concert this weekend?_

_Yeah, I’ll be there_. She texts back.

 “Hey! Put that away!” Seth swats the phone out of her hand. “You’re missing all the action!”

 “Okay, Okay!” She concedes and pretends to focus back on the screen.

 Her eyes wander back to them eventually though and she can’t help but remember Seth’s words from what seems like so long ago.

_“We’ve got a love for each other don’t we?”_

They had been spoken from a place of cruelty then but now they’ve become more true than he could have ever realized.

They might be a broken, twisted, and sinful excuse for a family, but Kate knows they are inexplicably tied to each other in a way she never wants to break.


End file.
